Inside General Electric’s new global software center in San Ramon, Habib Abi-Rached waves his arms like an orchestra conductor in front of a bank of computer monitors showing an aerial view of a city.

As Abi-Rached’s arms move, so do graphic representations of various data sets: Everything from tree growth patterns over the previous decade to historical locations of downed electric lines — the sort of information that could in combination help a power utility prepare for a big storm.

Moments later, he is wirelessly rotating a 3-D image of a spinal cord, as a scrub-wearing surgeon might want to do in an operating room.

Using such innovative display techniques, scientists at GE’s rapidly growing Bishop Ranch center are trying to reimagine how people can interact with Big Data. And they intend to put GE in the center of it.

“We are building a data science center of excellence,” said Bill Ruh, a former Cisco Systems executive tapped by GE to take charge of the center.

GE has hired 500 people — 165 of them with advanced degrees, including many Ph.Ds — in less than two years to work at its new software center. Their mission is to pioneer the “Industrial Internet,” a confluence of computing, machine data and communications technologies that GE says will lead to global productivity gains not seen since the 19th-century Industrial Revolution.

Hiring continues at a rapid clip. Ruh predicts headcount will double again in less than two years to about 1,000. GE announced its global software center initiative in late 2011 and said it would spend $1 billion over three years.

Most of those hired to date are high-level engineers, statisticians and mathematicians with expertise in software, statistics and analytics, and 90 percent are new hires for GE. The majority came from other tech companies or academia because they believe the work is important, Ruh said.

Abi-Rached, who wrote his doctoral thesis on gesture control of computers at the University of Washington, is such a person.

“I’m doing the extension of my research at GE, rather than developing a video game,” he said. “I’ve been using this technology in things that are making the world run. I use it for aviation, transportation, health care, energy.”

Abi-Rached’s 15 person R&D lab is led by Arnie Lund, former principal lead of user experience at Microsoft and a celebrated figure in his field.

“We really can take advantage of this evolution of natural interfaces and create a kind of multimodal world where the technology really supports people and isn’t in the way. How could I say no to that?” Lund said.

Lund’s lab in turn is part of a 45-person (but quickly growing) user experience division that is charged with creating standard practices and tools for General Electric software. GE already has 13,000 software and analytics engineers working across multiple industries in 22 countries, but their efforts in the past have notably lacked cohesiveness, said Greg Petroff, who manages GE’s new design and experience division.

“GE is an enormous company with almost no user experience talent. They didn’t really have any two years ago when I joined,” said Petroff, who previously was vice president of product at SAP AG, the world’s largest business applications software company. Data scientists and user experience technologists are in particularly high demand in the Bay Area right now, but Petroff says being able to show people what he’s working on is a major help in recruiting.

“GE works at a scale like no other company,” and a person’s work can have tangible, global impact, said Petroff. “For a lot of people in the design community, that’s a missing aspect of their work.”

Already, the strategic changes Petroff’s team have instituted have helped dramatically speed up production times on some 100 software application projects, the products that GE is actually selling.

It took only took three months for a GE team in San Ramon to build a cloud-based program that can model an entire power plant, from meter to grid, in order to guide operations and schedule maintenance over a 20-year span. Similarly, GE’s software center was able to build a similar program for modeling oil well operations in just 70 days.

“All of the software looks and feels exactly the same,” said Jim Schmid, leader of the software application development teams focused on creating products and services for power and water, oil and gas and energy management. The team collectively represented a third of GE’s $153 billion in revenue last year. “These are very important things in helping me in the development shop crank stuff out quickly,” Schmid said.

Recent advances in mathematics and computational technology, of course, are also critical. “We couldn’t have done this three years ago,” he said.

The new power plant model simultaneously runs 175,000 different scenarios, crunching a 15-year repository of data from 1,500 turbines, each of which has sensors that report many times per second with thermodynamic and vibration data.

GE is developing similar applications for aviation, health care, mining, oil and gas and transportation, which along with power production collectively represent more than 30 percent of the global economy.

GE wants to take all the machine data and make it useful in real time, integrating it with operational systems, corporate systems such as financial records and external data sources — Google maps, for example — to bring Big Data into decision-making in boardrooms and in the field.

The entire ecosystem must work constantly — even in transit — across different types of web and on-premise technology platforms and devices. Changes must be possible on the fly without disruptions.

Such an ecosystem will require cooperation among a wide variety of technology companies, GE says, which is one reason why the company recently invested $105 million in April into Pivotal, a San Mateo Big Data spinout from EMC and VMware. GE also has big partnerships with Amazon and Accenture, among others.

This month, for example, GE also participated in a $30.6 million investment in Ayasdi, a Palo Alto data discovery company that emerged from research at Stanford, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation.

“This is not one company that’s going to do this,” Ruh said. “We’re really stepping up to build that ecosystem.”